Tag: coder

When I started to use the PhoneGap service to build mobile apps I had some dificulties on about where to begin or what should I use to get a very good looking app, even a simple “hello world” app was a bit difficult to do, so, here I will present a pack that I did with the basic stuff to start building a mobile app on PhoneGap.

As covered in another post of mine, the PhoneGap is a handy tool that allow web developers to develop native mobile apps just using HTML, CSS and Javascript, for more details about the PhoneGap tool, take a look on that introduction.

The PhoneGap Starter Kit, as I like to call, is a pack with the very basic stuff to start a simple app throuh PhoneGap. This pack includes:

Actually is hard to think in any new service without creating a mobile app, be a sales store, a social resource, any delivery service or even a game, all want to be present on mobiles.

Until some years ago, the ability to make a mobile app was just limited to those who knows C, C#, Java or yet other proprietary language, but than, comes the Adobe PhoneGap tools who give to all web developers the chance to build a native app using web coding knowledge.

The PhoneGap Service is free for building open-source apps through the github account, or in case of private projects the price depends of the plan. On free account the user can have at least one private project.

The PhoneGap uses the Apache Cordova lib and a web based rendering engine to make possible to run the HTML, CSS and Javascript content. The tools provided also includes a lot of plugins that makes possible the comunication to native resources of mobile devices like: giroscope, camera, contacts, files and all that native stuff without worring about the coding language, just add the plugin and code in javascript.

Basically, to get started, the developer just need to make or have an Adobe Id and subscribe to the PhoneGap Enviroment. After that the developer can download the desktop tools to build, compile and test the developed apps. Also, instead of download any software, it’s possible to code a native web app and upload a zip file to the PhoneGap Enviroment just to compile.

The online PhoneGap Compiler is fast, accepts to compile with your developer key and also gives a QRCode to download teh compiled app to test.

The PhoneGap compiler actually can build apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, which is very handy.

There is no doubt that developers/coders are one of the most requested professionals in the market these days. According to a research made by the Michael Page Recruitment Services, software engineers and developers are the most requested professionals on 82% of the countries that the research covered (Brazil, USA, Japan, UK, France, Chile, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Ireland).

You may be thinthing “Yes, I’m in!”, but wait, you must be updated with the new technologies to be a part of this research.

Recently, looking at many job offers on linkedin that pops up on our profiles I surprisingly saw, besides long experience, a lot of new technologies and languages mentioned on the “you must have” session, some of them are obviously needed like HTML5 and CSS3 but some others are a few emerging ones like the javascript frameworks between others.

So, I listed here some of these must have topics that I found (Not in order of importance):

HTML5 + CSS3

Python, Ruby, Java, PHP (Some are already requesting the PHP 7)

PHPUnit Testing

ECMAScript 6 (Javascript)

Javascript Frameworks (NodeJS, AngularJS, ReactJS)

MongoDB, MySQL, SQL Server

AWS (Amazon Web Services)

Git

CollaborativeWeb Enviroments (Docker, Vagrant Box)

DevOPs

Frameworks (Zend, Laravel, Magento, Symfony)

These are not the only requests that I’ve been seen, but, almost of them was present in the jobs propositions. Anyway, this list shows that the professional of technology, specially the developers, are quickcly discarded if is not up to date with these new trends.

We must keep an eye on everyday news and never think that we already know everything. Opportunity calls people that are ready.